Been playing Jedi Knight, and it's a fun game. I find myself not as motivated to play as I'd like to be, but that's because I know that any progress made this weekend is futile. December 15th needs to hurry the hell up. I want to get my Sith Warrior on and I'm avoiding playing it this weekend on purpose.

Is it just me or does it feel like the Sith side feel a little less polished than the Republic side?

That aside, really digging the game. Not a fan of the character design but at least it's consistent. I'm a bit shocked they didn't mo-cap cause alot of the animations look terrible. Swordplay is pretty solid but seems to be missing alot of that Star Wars flair of movement. The saber animations are iconic but the character movement (with he exception of Force Leap) needs work bad. Dunno what engine they're running with but was having problems with delayed texture loading ala Mass Effect 1 for dialogue scenes.

They're using HeroEngine. Don't know what's up with the texture pop-in, but I had a more amusing bug in the form of Satele Shan being about 10 inches tall during a cutscene and have it recorded for future lulz.

So, I caved and played Sith Warrior. It's interesting to see how different some of the animations are between the Sith Warrior and a Jedi Knight. For starters, the Sith's force charge looks much cooler than the Jedi's force leap. Probably has a lot to do with the forward flip that the Sith does. The attacks also look much more brutal while the Jedi's are very graceful. At times, the Sith almost treats his lightsaber like a baseball bat while the Jedi likes to twirl it around instead.

Having achieved my lightsaber in both stories, I definitely prefer the Sith's side. Korriban is also much cooler than Tython, but what can you do.

Played all weekend to give it a real fair chance.. overall I just feel meh on it. My highest level character is a 15 Bounty Hunter, I found the Empires starter area the best and the BH with the Hutt and Cantina storyline (directly from Return of the Jedi pretty much)... after the prologue the quests seem to get less focused and more of the same ol MMO thing. The Mass Effect_esque storymode is still abundant but the same really feels lacking in almost all RPG type elements to me (just pick a look, class and go! no real customizations untl talent trees at 10+)

Anyway I will check out the next weekend beta and see if things change, but I am not sure this will be a day 1 must have for me.

20 GB patch will be deployed tomorrow at 10 AM CST. Yeah, that's not a typo. We're downloading the majority of the client again... perhaps this is the release candidate. I can only assume the next test will take place over the Thanksgiving weekend, based on the fact that every other beta test weekend has happened on a holiday weekend. Just a heads up to snag it in advance. Also, numerous MMO news websites are handing out keys. If you haven't received a beta invite yet, I recommend snagging one.

Existing characters in the beta are not being wiped for the upcoming test. With that in mind, I think I'm going to dabble in crafting and get to know the mechanics of it a little better than I currently do. I think I'm going to go with artifice for my crafting skill, supplementing it with archeology as my gathering skill. I have no idea what mission skill I should take though.

I spent most of my time in quests and crafting on my Jedi Knight during last weekend's beta. I got my skills near the 200 mark.

I really enjoy the ability to craft and quest at the same time. Once I got three companions, it was like I was never missing any aspect of the game. What's funny is that the crafting items tended to be more powerful than the quest rewards as I was a synthweaver, my armour tended to always be the bis for that given level. The other cool thing is being able to reverse engineer the gear I was making to level to get back some of the mats used as well as getting a chance to unlock a superior recipe of that item.

Also, if you have the corresponding crew member who excels at a certain crew skill, there is a chance they can crit and create a version with more stats or with an extra socket for mods.

All in all, I really enjoyed the crafting in the game.

I got my key for the next text from curse.com if anyone needs to be pointed in the right direction.